This may come as a surprise, but the photo above represents my entire haul from Stitches West this time around. I went in vowing to be good, and boy was I! There were two yarns I knew I wanted to see: the new Shepherdess Worsted from Sincere Sheep (whose yarns you know I love) and the Heirloom from Fancy Tiger Crafts. The Shepherdess was love at first sight but I had to pick just one. (For now, anyway; it may be coming soon to Fringe Supply.) The Heirloom was … hm, underwhelming. It was a little lost in the booth I found it in, and the colors didn’t wow me the way I’d expected. I walked away from it, bummed. But on my way out of the show, I decided to go ahead and buy one and see if it would grow on me. I picked a really great super-dark plum, which seems to be a thing with me lately, and found myself repeatedly touching and gazing at it on the long drive home. So on that front, I’m hopeful. And, shopping aside, it was great to see some of you and make some new acquaintances, too.
If you had a great and productive knitting weekend, will you please tell me about it so I can live vicariously? Mine was very frustrating! I was all excited to cast on for my Garance, and expected to have made great progress by now, but no siree, that did not happen.
If I knit this sweater with the prescribed — and purchased — yarn, it will be the most expensive sweater I’ve ever owned. And since, on top of that, I talked myself into this rather daring (for me) color combo, I’m taking the swatching very seriously. Will you laugh if I tell you it took me almost the entire length of Beasts of the Southern Wild just to wind a skein of the cobweb mohair? So all I managed to knit that night was one small swatch, and when I saw it in daylight on Saturday, well, I did not swoon. Reserving judgment and exploring options, I knit another swatch with just the silk Heichi, no mohair, to see if that felt more “me.” And then I soaked them both. The combo swatch is a beautiful piece of fabric, soft and fuzzy and freakishly like the impression I have of the sweater that inspired the purchase. But it’s just not me. The silk-only swatch is perfectly nice but I’m still not dying to wear it. So I either need to do the silk-mohair combo in a neutral, or send it all back and pick a different yarn for this sweater. Drat.
After that, I turned to my Guillemet hat but wound up figuratively throwing it across the room. The yarn I’ve been knitting it in is so painfully, horribly, depressingly boring that I just can’t bring myself to finish it, no matter how much I like the design.
Nothing makes me quite as itchy as three days with effectively no knitting. So someone, please, tell me an uplifting tale of projects gone right!
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